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THE ROYAL CEMETERY AT UR DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM B.C.: POTTERY ANALYSIS THROUGH THE USE OF ARCHIVAL DATA, A CASE STUDY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Luca Volpi
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Abstract

The Royal Cemetery at Ur, with its almost two thousand graves, is one of the most impressive archaeological settings in southern Mesopotamia. Although most of the graves have been assigned to the Early Dynastic Period, more than three hundred graves have been dated to a timeframe from the Late Akkadian Period to the end of the third millennium B.C. However, the precise dating of many of these graves is under debate because stratigraphic data are often lacking, and the material culture used for dating has mainly been cylinder seals and other small finds. Due to the poor quality of the data published by Woolley, pottery has rarely been used to establish chronological determinants that could be useful in dating the graves. Thanks to the Ur Digitization Project, the field records from the Ur excavations are now available online. Among them are the Field Notes, which often contain pottery drawings, reproduced to scale. This paper re-analyses some of the graves in the Royal Cemetery at Ur that have been dated to the final part of the third millennium B.C. This analysis is based on a typological approach to the pottery assemblages that allows revised chronological determinants for dating selected grave contexts.

Keywords

UrMesopotamiaRoyal Cemeterypotterychronology
Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 82 , December 2020 , pp. 227 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2020

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